The Hardyman | Page 3

night was more than Jack could stand.
Until the wee hours of the morning, Jack would lie awake, sure that if
he fell asleep, the man across the street would develop irreversible
premature ejaculation problems, his mother would disappear with a
quiet dial tone, and any man who dared parachute out of an airplane in
the future would fall with a crumple to the ground.
For Jack, life was hard.
4
One day, it came to him. It was a sign. JUNK, it read. The word leapt
out in front of him from around a curve on the freeway as if it had been
lying in wait for him. Truly, it was a sign, in that it was a billboard, but
to Jack it was as if the gray knuckle-haired finger of God had instructed
him, Go! Here! Now! He had taken the next exit.

Even as the junkyard dog repeatedly attempted to remove his testicles
with its teeth, Jack stood his ground, transfixed by how compelling the
metaphorical hand of God in the sky had been to him. The dog kept
twisting itself into the air, snapping its jaws shut over and over again
near Jack's groin. Finally, an elderly man in oil-stained coveralls
appeared, called off the dog, and relieved Jack of five dollars. Jack
made his way into the yard between stacks of sandwiched cars.
He could spend days here, he realized, wandering from piles of
smashed up trucks to mountains of wrecked tractors to endless heaps of
unidentifiable rusted factory parts. He wandered through the metal
wreckage, marveling at the mechanical detritus Man had left behind.
An hour later, in an overgrown corner of the lot, he tripped over a
broken box spring. Sitting on it, bouncing lightly up and down, his eye
alit on something within the metallic maze before him. At first he
thought it was one more chunk of refrigerator innards. When he
approached it, he saw that it was a splayed and wrecked apparatus,
lying in the dirt in a position akin to a crucifix's pose.
Years ago, in a college-level engineering textbook, he had read about
something like this. It had been called the Hardyman. In 1965, as he
recalled, the Army, Navy, and General Electric had undertaken a rare
conjoined effort to build a mechanical man-amplifier for military
purposes. Intended to advance American soldiers' physical potential, it
would be the first wearable, bipedal robotic exoskeleton. In the end,
though, the line of super-soldier suits had failed. At the time, the suit
had lacked a brain.
Today, Jack considered, things could be different. He began making his
way back towards the junkyard office. What were the odds? he
marveled. What were the odds?
5
The junkyard owner--whose nickname, Backhoe Bob, rightly indicated
he knew a lot about backhoes and very little about possible prototypes
for long-forgotten military projects--sold the find to Jack for $1,200.
Pepe Delores, a large and benevolent fellow employee of the train

system who worked in maintenance, was more than happy to boost one
of their mutual employer's flatbed trucks and a forklift for a midday
joyride. At the junkyard, Pepe's Herculean efforts with a crane enabled
the men to extract the Hardyman from underneath the avalanche of
parts beneath which it lay, half-buried. The Hardyman rode home
behind them, flat on its back, hidden by a big black tarp.
On Jack's quiet neighborhood street, the incessant beeping of Pepe's
truck reversing slowly along the driveway rang out alarmingly loud.
Under the glaring midday sun, little around them stirred. As soon as
Pepe finished lowering the haul to the garage floor, Jack pulled the
garage door closed. To Jack's relief, at no point did Pepe inquire as to
exactly why Jack wanted to acquire this particular artifact. Instead,
Pepe winked at him in the rear-view mirror as he drove away, waving
one large hand out the window.
At last, Jack was alone with it. He approached its hulking shadow,
silhouetted in a shaft of light seeping under the garage door. He laid his
hands on it. It was cool to the touch. A thin layer of rust flaked off
beneath his hands as he ran his palms across the places where the
machine's warped exteriors had pulled back to expose its interior maze
of wires, servos, and plugs. Jack explored the Hardyman's body,
imagining what it had been when it had tried to stand for the first time.
On the computer in his home office, Jack found what appeared to be
the only photo that had ever been publicly released of the Hardyman. In
the photo, a thinly smiling man in a collared-shirt, a narrow black tie, a
white hard-hat, and thick Buddy Holly glasses was suspended within
the exoskeletal suit. He had one monstrous robot arm raised into the